On Reddit, communities could have their own wikis or knowledge base articles in a separate place from where the discussion happened. I don’t see that kind of functionality in Kbin, so I’m wondering if there is a federated wiki type of thing somewhere out there.
Hrm - would you want federated wikis? What’s the benefit vs wikis run independently?
For example, wikipedia has a corner on encyclopedia type knowledge. No reason to federate as the central moderation on Wikipedia seems to work well. To be honest, I wouldn’t trust encyclopedia type information from another wiki site as I don’t know how active the community is there to maintain the accuracy of the information.
Then there’s other wikis I know about like for games (thinking fandom.com) - but again not really a reason to federate between those that I can think of.
To be honest, my gut reaction is that I want fewer wiki sources, not more.
Reddit wikis are more about having a static page for information associated with a community than being a wiki proper. For example, music subs that maintain a “hall of fame” in a wiki page, or subreddit rules, or FAQs, etc. Not at all the type of stuff that would go on a fan wiki or wikipedia. This use case is valuable, although there are other solutions to the problem, e.g., sticky posts.
I’m not sure that would need to be federated. Maybe just to lemmy and other platforms with a similar model. But also, that should be up to the other instances, not us. If Mastodon figures out how to show a kbin “wiki” to their users in a way that is useful and makes sense, then why not let them do it?
I just figured since the Fediverse is so awesome for everything else, why not shoehorn a wiki into it? lol.
You’re absolutely right though, a pinned thread could accomplish a similar function as a Reddit wiki page.
The thing with wikis (actual wikis, i mean) is that anyone can edit them (in principle, at least), and there’s plethora of wiki sites out there, and its easy to host your own (well, as easy as hosting your own kbin instance). So federation feels much more purely an organizational change; the only change it offers to the user is the possibility of integration with other fediverse apps. And wikis aren’t social media sites, so I’m not sure what the appeal of that is. Do i… see it in my feed when someone edits the “Del in cylindrical and spherical coordinates” page? Is browsing the wiki from within kbin actually more useful than opening it in a new tab?
Distributed ownership of a wiki is definitely a good idea, but i don’t see the benefit of it being federated.
You’re absolutely right, and I think you’ve helped me figure out a bit more precisely what I’m looking for. Particularly this:
Distributed ownership of a wiki is definitely a good idea, but i don’t see the benefit of it being federated.
Decentralization is what I’m after, not necessarily federation.
